Napoleonic advancement in the Wellcome Library

Popular fascination with Napoleon’s military aristocracy, the two dozen or so assorted sons of small tradesman and junior army officers of the old regime who rose to Marshal’s rank, riches and titles on the back of Bonaparte’s campaigns, shows no sign of diminishing. The individual qualities and personalities of these men are perhaps less the focus of interest than the phenomenon of exponential career advancement that they represent; indeed military historians generally consign them as a group to the ranks of the second rate.

One or two however stand out, among them Jean Lannes (1769-1809), Duc de Montebello, one of the few among Napoleon’s underlings who proved competent as an independent commander-in-chief as well as in a subordinate role to Bonaparte himself. Lannes was also the first of Napoleon’s marshals to die from enemy action. He was struck by ricocheting shot on the field of Essling outside Vienna on 22 May 1809. His shattered leg was amputated by Dominique Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of the Guard, but septicaemia set in some time later and on 30 May Lannes expired after three days of delirium and agony.

The Wellcome Library holds a collection of Larrey’s letters home to his wife Charlotte, one of which, written from Vienna on 1 June, describes the last days of Marshal Lannes in some detail:

"I spent three nights and three days at his side without interruption. I tried with all my care, energy and skill but still he died. The blood lost before the operation and the shock to his entire system had weakened him fatally. On opening his body the ventricles of his heart were found to be entirely devoid of blood. I lost him on the 9th day after his injury … his death has upset me a great deal".

Part of the reason for Larrey’s discomfiture was the loss of Lannes’s advocacy on his behalf as he made his career in the cut-throat world of Napoleonic army politics. Not only did one need all the high-placed friends one could get, it was also no doubt unsettling to contemplate failure to save the life of one of Napoleon’s favourite marshals. Larrey was on tenterhooks of expectation of a barony, which had apparently been promised but somehow had not yet materialised. However, always alert to turning events to his advantage he was soon negotiating with the director of the Louvre for a part in the proposed monumental painting of the death of Lannes.

The Wellcome Library’s Larrey manuscripts, along with other relics of the Napoleonic wars, were formerly part of the renowned Bibliotheca Lindesiana, the collection of Alexander William Crawford Lindsay (1812-1880), earl of Crawford and of Balcarres, and his son James Ludovic Lindsay (1847-1913), the 26th earl of Crawford. Towards the end of the nineteenth century financial pressures led to the dispersal of much of the library; in 1900 all the manuscripts apart from the French revolutionary and Napoleonic documents were sold to Mrs Rylands and are now in the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester. The remaining material was finally sold at auction by the 27th earl and several lots were acquired by Sir Henry Wellcome for his collection.

Larrey’s correspondence is catalogued as Western MSS. 5316-5320 and can be consulted in the Wellcome Library’s Rare Materials Room.

Author: Richard Aspin

History of Medicine in Motion

The Wellcome Library has recently aided a project, organised by members of staff at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.

Titled 'History of Medicine in Motion', the project aimed to "showcase and explore digital media presentations of the History of Medicine. In piloting new formats for delivering scholarly content and offering training in their development, the aim is to provide a platform for discussing the opportunities, problems and challenges that these media may hold for the dissemination of scholarly research".

'History of Medicine in Motion' utilised the knowledge of Prof Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University, a skilled advocate in both using such resources in his teaching and in his encouragement of his students to do the same.

The project's concluding workshop, reviewed clips on the History of Medicine, submitted through an online competition.

The standard of the clips was extremely high, and given the content freely available from the Wellcome Library, it wasn't surprising that our resources featured heavily. Indeed, first prize went to Harriet Palfreyman's 'Picturing the Pox: A (Very) Brief History', which consisted entirely of images from our collections.



The workshop was a clear success, and all the clips that were submitted are worthy of attention. (Though two clips in particular, catch the eye of this blog).

The origins of NHS bureaucracy

The Dispensary movement had its beginnings in London in the second half of the 18th century. Championed by the Quaker physician John Coakley Lettsom, a system of dispensaries was introduced where the poor could be treated as out-patients and even be attended at home by physicians of high rank. The dispensaries were supported by individual subscribers who could then sponsor a patient. The library has recently purchased six printed forms which are rare examples of how administration of the sponsorship system worked and the origins of our modern health service bureaucracy.

Three forms were for the Surrey Dispensary – admission (with a long list of rules), for the patient to thank their sponsor on recovery and a third for the services of a midwife. The other set were for Eastern Dispensary – admission, to give thanks to the sponsor and to inform the sponsor that the previous patient had died and there was a vacancy. Along with these are two small pamphlets giving an account of these two dispensaries, including a list of the subscribers.

What is even more unique about this set of forms is that we know who originally collected them and why. These items were among the recently dispersed papers of Thomas Adams (d. 1813), solicitor, agent for the Duke of Northumberland and owner of Eshott Hall, south of Alnwick (purchased in 1783). They were sold at auction in Carlisle by Thomson Roddick & Metcalf auctioneers in July & August 2008. It is clear from a letter which accompanies the Surrey pamphlet, and a number of other documents from the collection, that Adams was planning to set up a dispensary in Alnwick and went about gathering as much information on the management of these institutions as he could find. He collected other material from Newcastle, Durham and Wakefield. For some reason his ambition was not realised until after his death. The Alnwick Dispensary was founded in 1815.

The original building for the Surrey Dispensary, dating from 1777, still survives on Falmouth Road Southwark. The records, including subscription books and patient registers, are now held at the London Metropolitan Archives. The Eastern Dispensary moved to new premises in 1858. It closed in 1940, but now has a new lease of life as The Dispensary Pub and Dining Room.

Detailed descriptions of all the items can be found in the Wellcome library catalogue.

The continued adventures of Wound Man

Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each from the same two viewpoints, and so on. Strangest to our modern eyes is the illustration that usually comes last: the Wound Man, a compendium of all the injuries that a body might sustain. Captions beside the stoic figure describe the injuries and sometimes give prognoses: often precise distinctions are drawn between types of injuries, such as whether an arrow has embedded itself in a muscle or shot right through. (The latter is better – the arrowhead can be cut away and the shaft withdrawn smoothly, whilst the embedded arrow will tear the muscle with its barbs when pulled out.)

Once seen, never forgotten: the Wound Man feels like an old friend to many Wellcome Library users, and the example here from our MS.290 has adorned several items of Library publicity. It’s interesting, then, to see him appearing in a new twenty-first century context: as part of the current Queer Up North festival, the one-man show The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley sees our medieval figure reimagined as a superhero, a “freelance social interventionist” (now decently clad in a posing pouch). The centuries pass and Wound Man endures, dealing with everything that life can throw at him, an example to us all.

History of Surgery Timeline

'The Operation: Surgery Live' will be shown on Channel 4 on four consecutive nights from 25 May to 28 May. The series is being made by Windfall Films in association with Wellcome Collection. It aims to offer a unique insight into modern surgery by allowing viewers to interact with the operating theatre as the operations are carried out.

To provide context for the series, Windfall Films have worked with the Wellcome Library to produce a History of Surgery Timeline, illustrating surgical techniques and practices from the Neolithic period to the present day.

More information on the series is available through the Wellcome Trust's website.

Robert Whytt portrayed from the life

Robert Whytt. Oil painting by G.B. Bellucci, 1738.

Wellcome Library no. 665664i

Robert Whytt (1714-1766) was both a practising physician in Edinburgh and a professor at Edinburgh University. His extensive writings record his search for answers to questions that are still studied today: what distinguishes life from death, how people stay alive, why they fall ill, and what are the invisible processes involved. The seeming familiarity of some of his discoveries, such as the reflex action, led the neurosurgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson (1886–1961) to say that Whytt was "by common consent, the greatest of the early neurophysiologists". [1]

That verdict may today seem rather comical. Whytt lived in the 18th-century, and his ideas are not readily comprehensible today without some reference to his inherited vocabulary. [2] His thoughts about the nervous system came to the fore in a long-standing controversy with Albrecht von Haller over the faculty of sensation: Whytt's idea was that sensation, and indeed life itself, was due to the soul's distribution throughout the body, and its ability to take on different forms and functions in the different organs in which it lodged. Although Whytt has been called "the last of the animists" (French, p. 164), he is distinguished from the animists of the Stahl school, who thought that the soul must be a centralised controlling unit. Can Whytt really be said to have "discovered the reflex action", at least in a sense familiar today, if he saw the phenomenon he was describing as a function of invisible and sometimes non-material "animal fluids" channelling the functions of the Aristotelian soul around the various parts of the body?

As this example shows, despite his extensive writings Whytt is not an easy figure to get to grips with. Even the pronunciation of his name is unclear (it seems to be identical with "white"). There is an excellent monograph on him, written by the late Roger K. French, and published by the Wellcome Institute. However, reading that monograph, one understands why French's adviser, Professor Alistair Crombie, allotted this intractable subject to one of his most talented students (French later became a distinguished historian, particularly of mediaeval thought). It is characteristic of Whytt that he died of a mysterious complex of symptoms said to "correspond to no known disease" (French p. 13)

It is perhaps easier to approach Whytt through his historical context, as a luminary of the Edinburgh enlightenment and through his role in the Edinburgh medical world of his day. Fortunately he left an archive which passed through his descendants until part of it was acquired by the Wellcome Library in 1991. Drafts of his writings allow one to see his thought in action (click on the image on the left to read his manuscript).



Manuscript draft by Robert Whytt, 'The cure of (some of added) the most remarkable (symptoms of deleted) nervous, hypochondriac or hysteric (disorders deleted) symptoms'. Wellcome Library MS 6877/4

Missing from the archive available at that time was the portrait which Whytt commissioned from G.B. Bellucci in 1738 (reproduced above). The portrait remained with his descendants and has been inaccessible to the public for virtually its entire history. Fortunately it has now become possible for the Wellcome Library to acquire the portrait and reunite it with Whytt's papers. The portrait shows the young Whytt in the year in which he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, exuding the confidence that led him to lock horns with Haller.

The portrait is signed "Bellucci pinxit An.o 1738" (Bellucci painted it in the year 1738). Giovanni Battista Bellucci (1684–1760) was the son of the Venetian painter Antonio Bellucci (1654–1726), and came to England with his father in 1716. When Antonio returned to Venice in 1722, Giovanni Battista stayed behind and made his career as a portraitist in the British Isles, though today his paintings are hard to find. There is a portrait attributed to him in the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, as is a painting of Diana in Northampton Museum, Northamptonshire, but the two main collections of his work, in Schloss Pirnitz (Brtnice, now in the Czech Republic) and in Tyninghame House (in East Lothian, Scotland) appear to have been dispersed. [3]

[1] Roger French, Robert Whytt, the soul and medicine, London: Wellcome Institute, 1969
[2] The context is richly described by G.S. Rousseau in Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture, and sensibility, Basingstoke 2004
[3] Zdenek Kazlepka, 'Se ancor del tutto fosse inesperto il mio talento del'arte liberale della dipintura ... Die Maler Giovanni Battista Bellucci und Antonio Lucino in der Korrespondenz mit Antonio Rambaldo, Graf Collalto e San Salvatore (1718-1722)', Römische Historische Mitteilungen, 2006, 48: 395–408

More Spilsbury case cards

Last November we reported on the acquisition via a sale at Sothebys of nearly 4000 index cards of notes of Sir Bernard Spilsbury's autopsies.

This collection has proved highly popular with readers since it has become available.

We are now delighted to report that as a result of the publicity around this important acquisition, a further 3000+ case cards have been received as a gift to the Library.

These cards clearly follow on from the sequence previously received, covering the years 1933 to 1946, although there are still some unaccounted for gaps. There are no cards at all from the years 1939 and 1940, some breaks in the sequence for other years, only three cards from 1945 and a single specimen from 1946. As with the previous accession, the cards reflect the extremely wide range of Spilsbury's routine investigations of sudden and unexpected death from all causes, not merely his notorious high-profile involvement in murder cases.

This new accession of cards has now been catalogued: to see the catalogue, go to the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue and put PP/SPI in the Reference field of the search interface. Click on the blue numerals in the lefthand column of the resulting hitlist for the detailed descriptions. The cards are available for research subject to the usual conditions of access to archive material.

Item of the month - May 2009

Back in March we highlighted a work by William Blades – The Enemies of Books. This single parchment leaf, Western MS.46, has had to deal with a number of threats included in Blades’ list - fire, water, ignorance and bigotry, and bookbinders, but to this list we might also add well-meaning librarians. Its hazardous journey began around the year 1000 A.D. when it was a blank leaf in a manuscript book probably part of an English monastic library. Some time in the early 11th century several different monks wrote down medical recipes on the blank leaf, not in Latin but in English.

The medical recipes are for treating heartache, lung disease, 'wenns' or tumours, and liver disease. Just a few hundred complete Anglo-Saxon manuscripts survive and only a very small number of these are scientific texts. The Old English Herbarium is a translation of the Latin Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius (British Library MS. Cotton Vitellius C III), the Lacnunga is a miscellaneous collection of medical texts (British Library MS. Harley 585) and Bald’s Leechbook is a medical text compiled in the 9th century (British Library MS. Royal 12 D.XVII). We don't know much about the recipes on our leaf and further research is still needed.

The leaf happily stayed in its volume for 500 years, until Henry VIII decided to close English monasteries and confiscate their property. Many manuscripts were destroyed, broken up to be used for lining boxes, hats and gloves and for bindings of new printed books. This leaf became the cover for a Latin school book printed in 1558 (Petrus Mosellanus, Tabulae de schematibus et tropis ). The book came into the collection of John, Lord Robartes (1606-1685) at Lanhydrock, Cornwall (ironically, an estate which had previously been owned by the Augustinian priory of St Petroc at Bodmin). And so another 300 years passed uneventfully for our parchment leaf, only troubled by dust and neglect, another of Blades’ enemies. Then, on 4 April 1881, the house was engulfed by fire. Miraculously the books survived, thrown out of the library windows.


Having survived the fire, the books were then to suffer at the hands of a well-meaning librarian, William Henry Allnutt, who was an assistant in the Bodleian Library. In the 1880s he was employed on a part time basis at Lanhydrock to reorder and catalogue the books and decided to remove many manuscript and printed fragments from their bindings. This leaf became part of a volume of manuscript fragments, labelled B.12.26, which was then sold to the Bodleian Library in 1963 (MS. Lat. Misc. b.17). However, a few years earlier several leaves were removed and sold separately. The Wellcome Library purchased this leaf at Sotheby’s in 1956. The printed school book remains in the library at Lanhydrock (shelfmark D.7.34), now in a 19th century binding. The estate is now managed by the National Trust.

There is a full description of Western MS.46, including a modern English translation of the recipes, in the archives database. If you would like to find out more about the Wellcome Library’s collection of manuscript and printed herbals, there will be an Insights talk ‘Healing Herbs’ on Thursday 4 June at 3pm. More information will be available soon on the Wellcome Collection website.

Edward S. Curtis in the Wellcome Library

A recent post on the BBC News Viewfinder Blog draws attention to the remarkable work of Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952), a legendary American photographer, writer, and pioneering ethnographic filmmaker.

The Wellcome Library holds thirteen first generation prints of the outstanding photographs Curtis produced of Native American peoples. Remarkable both as artworks and ethnographic studies, they are a vital record of traditions that were fast being eroded and transformed.

Fearing that Native Americans were ‘a vanishing race’, for nearly thirty years Curtis travelled throughout the American West, documenting over eighty tribes to ensure that some trace of their traditional ways remained. Funded by the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, and with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, his work culminated in the publication of his twenty-volume study, The North American Indian, which contained some 2, 232 photographs with accompanying text.

Curtis sought to record all aspects of the native traditions he encountered. When he did not come upon such traditions naturally, Curtis would attempt to accurately recreate them, as was the accepted ethnographic practice of his day. In the photograph to the right, three Navajo gods, or Holy People, are given earthly form in a Navajo ceremony, the Yeibichai, or Night Way. Wakened and compelled by the reiteration of ritual words and acts - fixed rhythms it would be perilous to break - the mysterious and powerful Holy People are called upon to restore harmony to the universe, unbalanced by the actions of man, the cause of sickness and decay. Curtis was with the Navajo in the spring, rather than in the winter months when such a ceremony would usually have been performed. Unperturbed, he recruited various individuals, including the sons of a non-Navajo trader, Charlie and Sam Day, to recreate the costumes of the masked Holy People and to pose for him in them. Represented here are Tonenili – the rain god, a storm of foliage – and the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water, war gods who played roles in most Navajo ceremonies.

Though his work was celebrated in his day, Curtis lost the rights to The North American Indian and died in poverty owing to the great costs he accrued pursuing his exhaustive project. Thanks to the determined vision of Curtis, his work remains as one of the most important records of Native American culture undertaken.

The Curtis prints held by the Wellcome Library are available to be viewed freely in the library. Reproductions of a number of these prints can also be seen in the Medicine Man gallery of Wellcome Collection.

The photographer's view: AIDS posters

All 3,000 AIDS posters held in the Wellcome Library's AIDS poster collection have now been digitised, and are gradually going up online on Wellcome Images as they are catalogued, and as the Library's rights-clearance procedure is carried out.

Photographing the collection has been an enlightening experience. Throughout the process I was particularly struck by the variety of ways in which different countries chose to approach their AIDS awareness campaigns and how they tailored the content to appeal to different social groups.

The photography itself was relatively straightforward, with the greatest challenge being the organisation of varying sizes of posters into efficient workflow batches, as sizes ranged from 21cm to over 2.5 metres. The type of media upon which the posters were printed also kept me on my toes, from highly reflective gloss finishes to almost rice paper-thin substrates, each requiring slightly different techniques.

From the perspective of a photographer the Wellcome's AIDS poster collection, to me, represents a truly valuable resource as a means of tracking graphic design and photographic trends over the past three decades across many different countries and many different cultures. What makes it so interesting in this respect is that ultimately they were all working to the same brief - that of combating the spread of AIDS.

Author: Ben Gilbert

Image: Advertisement for The Naz Project to support Asian communities with AIDS/HIV. Wellcome Library ref: 666554i.

Telescope and Paintbrush in Pisa

Galileo Galilei. Oil painting. Wellcome Library no. 45628i

The summer of 2009 sees a wave of celebrations to mark the fourth centenary of Galileo's first use of the telescope to observe celestial phenomena. In his birthplace Pisa, the exhibition Telescope and Paintbrush: New art and new knowledge in the age of Galileo opened at the Palazzo Blu on 9 May. The exhibition shows how the new discoveries arising from the telescope were adopted as themes by the painters, writers and musicians of his time; how Galileo himself was portrayed; the relationships between Galileo and collectors and connoisseurs; Galileo's association with the Florentine painter Ludovico Cardi, called il Cigoli; and the European impact of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius. The exhibition rescues from obscurity many little-known works, and includes a reconstruction of Galileo's own collection of paintings at the time of his death.

One of the loans from the Wellcome Library is the portrait traditionally identified as a painting of Galileo's daughter Virginia (1600-1634) known under her religious name as Sister Maria Celeste: she was a nun of the order of the Poor Clares, and the comfort of Galileo's old age. This could be one of the Wellcome Library's most reproduced works, as it appears on the front cover of Dava Sobel's international best-seller Galileo's daughter (1999).

Above: the portrait of "Galileo's daughter", Wellcome Library no. 45565i.


Right: Dava Sobel with the portrait. Note that since Dava Sobel's visit, the old frame has been cleaned of the later overpaint which obscured the indented running pattern.

Visitors to Pisa will also see from the Wellcome Library this painting (below) of a philosopher with a celestial globe, one of several seventeenth-century Italian paintings of astronomical subjects inspired by Galileo's growing fame.

Wellcome Library no. 45633i

The painting, like some of the other Galileana in the Wellcome Library, was bought by Henry S. Wellcome from the private museum of Galileo personalia assembled by Count Paolo Galletti at the Torre del Gallo, near Florence, and is in a frame with a pattern found on several paintings with the same provenance.

The exhibition Il Cannocchiale e il pennello: Nuova scienza e nuova arte nell’età di Galileo is at Palazzo Blu, Lungarno Gambacorti 9, Pisa, from 9 May 2009 to 19 July 2009, open Tuesday-Sunday 10.00-20.00. Website: http://www.palazzoblu.it/

Palazzo Blu is the former Palazzo Giuli, taken over by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Pisa as its own headquarters and as a cultural centre. For related events in Pisa see http://www.galileoapisa.it/sito

Hunt the Ancestor Workshop

There are still places available on the free Hunt the Ancestor workshop at the Wellcome Library, tomorrow, 12 May, 2-3pm. Was someone in your family a doctor, nurse or patient? Find out about the wealth of resources available to the family historian. To see all upcoming Library events, visit our events calendar.

Image: Detail, coloured lithograph by A. Strassgschwandtner after himself, ca. 1860, Wellcome Library ref. 563680i.

Ottoman Turkish manuscripts week

Developed in association with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, the Wellcome Library is hosting a week-long study course based around our Ottoman Turkish manuscripts.

Date: 1–4 June 2009

Course tutor: Mr Philippe Bora Keskiner, SOAS, University of London

Venue: Wellcome Trust, Gibbs Building, 215 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Timetable:
Monday 1 June, 15.00–18.00
Introduction to the Ottoman Turkish tradition of manuscript production, and handling of original manuscripts.

Tuesday 2 – Thursday 4 June, 15.00–18.00
Practical sessions in reading Ottoman Turkish manuscripts.

Handouts and learning packs will be provided, and a certificate of attendance will be issued upon successful completion of the course.

Participants should have completed at least three years of Turkish studies; final-year undergraduates, postgraduates and others with a good knowledge of Turkish will be welcome.

The course is free, but pre-registration is essential and numbers are limited to 15.

For further information, please contact Dr Nikolaj Serikoff, Wellcome Library: n.serikoff@wellcome.ac.uk

To book a place, please contact Tracy Tillotson, Wellcome Library: t.tillotson@wellcome.ac.uk

Layers of identity: Sir Charles Wyndham

Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End is hard to miss. Located in Charing Cross Road next to Leicester Square Underground station and adorned with crisp neo-baroque stone-carvings, it is surrounded in the early evenings by theatre-goers waiting for friends before entering the auditorium. It is named after the man who built it, Sir Charles Wyndham (1837-1919), actor and manager of the theatre. However, Wyndham was not his family name. Before he adopted it, he was Dr Charles Culverwell: his metamorphosis, from jobbing doctor to theatrical knight, is a good example of artfully manipulated identity.

Culverwell's father and uncle were both doctors of a sort. His father, Major Richard Culverwell -- as with the epidemiologist Major Greenwood, Major was his forename, not a military rank -- apparently had an M.D. degree, but instead of practising medicine, he ran a Turkish bath in the City, and together with his brother, Samuel Henry Culverwell, owned hotels in Arundel Street and Norfolk Street, both streets joining the Strand with the Thames. A third brother was Charles's doctor-uncle Robert James Culverwell MRCS (1802-1852), a fringe practitioner with a Giessen M.D. who also ran a bath-house in the City of London, and another one at 10 Argyll Place, off Oxford Street. The baths were advertised in his many popular pamphlets on bathing, indigestion, nervous diseases, "marriage", venereal disease, fresh air, health and longevity. He practised near the bottom of the medical hierarchy.

Charles Culverwell's education and early career followed those of his uncle so closely that people who had not met them must have assumed they were the same man: schooling in Germany, followed by medical education in Dublin, King's College London (near the family hotels), and an MD from Giessen, followed by medical practice in Great Marlborough Street, round the corner from his uncle's West End sauna. In 1860, eight years after his uncle's death, he published Health, happiness and longevity (price 1 shilling, so presumably a puffing pamphlet), and in 1863 advertised his practice in terms similar to his late uncle's:

Dr. Culverwell, M.R.C.S., L.M., L.S.A., 3, Great Marlborough Street, W., can be consulted upon all cases of nervous debility, involuntary blushing, palpitation, loss of memory, incapacity, spermatorrhoea, sterility, cauterisation and galvanism. Just published, 1s., by post 13 stamps: 18 sealed—" Marriage, its obligations, happiness and disappointments". Mann, Cornhill, or Author, as above.

Charles Culverwell was also involved in both amateur and professional theatre as an actor. In that field, he later claimed to have given his career a leg up by publishing lavish reviews of his own performances in the Theatrical journal. On a trip to America in 1862-1864 he tried both professions. As a surgeon he served for the Union army in the American Civil War, mostly in St Louis and New Orleans (with the aid of a testimonial from P.T. Barnum, whom he encountered by chance in a hotel lobby). As an actor he played with little success in performances in New York and Washington, where he appeared on stage in Hamlet with the later assassin John Wilkes Booth playing the title role.

However, after his return to England his career in the theatre advanced apace: in the words of the Oxford DNB ,

A slightly crooked mouth and heavy eyelids lent him a quizzical or mystified look that only enhanced his appeal. As his wavy hair turned from brown to silver his charisma increased. Seldom in fifty years on the stage did he fail to capture the men's admiration or the women's hearts. With the sole exception of Ellen Terry, no British player of his era surpassed his ability to sway the audience by the power of personal charm.

Gradually Dr Charles Culverwell, the agony uncle of Great Marlborough Street, faded from view: after 1882 he no longer submitted his name to the Medical Directory and in 1886 he changed his name formally from Charles Culverwell to to his stage name of Charles Wyndham. A warning to those who assume that disappearance of a name from the Medical Directory means that the person concerned had died -– though in a sense, Dr Culverwell had died. In 1890 when the Surgeon General's Office in Washington D.C. needed to get in touch with Dr Culverwell, the Post Office in London replied that there was no trace of him, though at the time he was starring at the Criterion Theatre, with his new name in lights above Piccadilly Circus. His only continuing connection with the medical world was a willingness to put on fund-raising performances for hospitals such as the Middlesex. Wyndham was knighted in 1902 and died in 1919.

The 1889 photograph of Wyndham by Barraud (above) thoroughly bears out the pen-picture in the Oxford DNB (click on the image to enlarge it). The portrait has recently been added to the Wellcome Library and joins other portraits of public performers such as acrobats, preachers, singers, quack-doctors and horse-tamers.

Wyndham was familiar with the illusory qualities of human identity. In one play that he produced, critics praised the convincing performance of an unknown actor, named as Mr Crabbe, playing the part of a French waiter. Enquiries revealed that the part was played not by an actor at all but by a real Frenchman employed as a waiter at one of Wyndham's father's hotels. How many layers of representation does that make?

Sources
John Malcolm Bulloch, 'Sir Charles Wyndham's family, the Culverwells', Notes and queries, 27 April 1935: 290-294
George Rowell, 'An acting assistant surgeon', Nineteenth century theatre research, 12 (1984): 25-38

Photograph of Sir Charles Wyndham: Wellcome Library no. 672836i.
Photograph of Wyndham's theatre by Vivido, 29 December 2008 some rights reserved

Wellcome Film at Learning on Screen

The Wellcome Film project was showcased at the 2009 Learning on Screen Conference, hosted by the Wellcome Library and run by the BUFVC on 7-8 April. Held in the Auditorium of the Wellcome Collection building on 183 Euston Road, London, the event focussed on digital video accessibility issues with a special session on new online video initiatives. The presentations showed that a range of new software applications have the potential to make video more and more accessible to people with disabilities. Of particular note was Sal Cook's introduction to the JISC's TechDis service, with information about software for developers that will maximise audio-visual accessibility.


The Wellcome Film project was presented by Christy Henshaw and Angela Saward on the second day, providing an overview of the project, its context in the Library's digitisation programme, choice of content, formats, metadata, and the various delivery methods utilised (open access via the Wellcome Library online catalogue, and HE/FE access via Film and Sound Online). A selection of clips was screened at the end of the presentation to illustrate the range of content chosen for inclusion in the project.

The Wellcome Film project has to date made over 200 titles accessible, including "Talk about Insulin", 1959 (below). This video shows an interview with Prof. Charles H. Best and Dr R.D. Lawrence. Prof. Best, along with Dr Frederick Banting, discovered the use of insulin in treating diabetes. Dr R.D. Lawrence was one of the first diabetics to receive insulin, and went on to carry out further research in this area.

Wellcome Library Insight - Madness

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, explores the theme of 'Madness' and Mental Health.

Details.

BMJ archive (1840 - ) online and free

To celebrate the launch of the BMJ archive - digitised under the auspices of the Wellcome Library's Medical Journals Backfiles project - an editorial in today's BMJ offers readers a prize of £1000 for the most interesting use of the archive.

For an introduction to the archive, the BMJ have produced a series of videos, featuring the former head of Britain’s Medical Research Council, Colin Blakemore, that focus on some of the important subjects and people that have appeared in the journal’s pages.

The first of these looks at James Simpson's paper in 1847 , which showed that chloroform was a better form of anesthesia than ether.

Future "From our archive" videos will feature John Snow, David Livingstone, Joseph Lister, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale, William Osler, Richard Doll, Alice Stewart, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz.

The full archive is available at bmj.com, PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central.